Penguin 4.0 is Changing the Way Pages (and Websites) Rank in Google

Your website’s ranking in Google determines how far up the search results it will show when a person searches for keywords. Google doesn’t determine the ranking of every website by manually going through the websites and determining if the information contained in each is valuable. Instead, it depends on an algorithm to determine the search placement ranking for each website.

What is the Google search engine placement ranking algorithm?

Currently, Google has more than 200 points in its algorithm that work together to determine the placement of each website. In an effort to keep up with the current trends, technological advances, and information available, Google updates the algorithm periodically.The current update is Penguin 4.0. Understanding how this can affect your website and how to use the information to boost your website is crucial.

How fast will results be noticeable with Penguin 4.0?

Previous versions of Penguin only updated search engine rankings when the program was refreshed. This means that there could be significant time between the date when a website was crawled and when the search engine rankings were updated. Typically, domain owners wouldn’t see results quickly when they made improvements to the content on the website.The newest version of Penguin provides instantaneous search engine ranking updates. Now, that doesn’t mean that you can check your ranking as soon as you publish new content to your website. Instead, the new search engine placement will occur when Google crawls your website again. There isn’t any specific time between crawls for a specific website. Google has a special algorithm that determines the frequency of crawls for each domain.

Are entire websites affected by a single page?

Another big change with the new Penguin is that entire domains aren’t necessarily penalized because of one page. This Penguin updates changes to a system that devalues links — and pages– instead of demoting the website as a whole in Google search engine rankings.When Google determines that a link on a webpage is a spam link, Google devalues that link. One of the components that is considered in the Google search engine placement algorithm is linking. The links that point to a page and the links that the page points to matter.Devaluing the links has a negative effect on the search engine placement of a website. But it doesn’t have the doomsday result of demoting the entire website, so this component of Penguin 4.0 is a major bonus for many domain owners.Essentially, all of this means that people who choose low-quality websites to link to will end up having a lower Google search engine ranking than those who use high-quality pages to link to. But, that is the only component that affects a domain’s or page’s ranking.

How does this affect disavow and reconsideration?

With previous Penguin versions, websites that had low-quality, duplicate, or spam content were penalized. If the website wanted to have the penalty done away with, they were asked to disavow and ask for reconsideration. This process could take a long time to complete, and it was often difficult to get Google to take away penalties.The new Penguin 4.0, unofficially, does away with the need to go through the process. Theoretically, Penguin 4.0 will automatically pick up the new, fresh, “non-spammy” content on a domain and rank the website, or web page, accordingly. This means that website owners who genuinely want to improve their ranks will be able to do so without having to jump through Google’s proverbial hoops because all they will need is content that is unique and has authoritative links that make people want to come back and read more.

What does this mean for my domain?

For domain owners, the course of action here is fairly straightforward. You need to make sure that the content on your website’s pages isn’t found anywhere else on the Internet. Even short product descriptions need to be unique. The content on your website needs to be stuff that humans want to read. The days of putting together nonsensical longtail keywords in the hopes that Google would pick them up and rank the website high are gone.Short, natural keywords that sound conversational are the key to Google rankings. Using facts, figures, ideas, and other information that can be backed up by reputable sources is a must. Linking to webpages that contain this important information, which is known as outbound linking, is crucial when it comes to Google Penguin 4.0.Many domain owners aren’t familiar with Google, its algorithms, or search engine rankings. In those cases, turning to someone who keeps up with the current trends can help.